The internet is disrupting many content-focused industries, and the publishing landscape is beginning its own transformation in response. Tools haven’t yet been developed to properly, semantically export long-form writing. Most books are encumbered by Digital Rights Management (DRM), a piracy-encouraging practice long since abandoned by the music industry. In the second article of a two-part series in this issue, Nick Disabato discusses the ramifications of these practices for various publishers and proposes a way forward, so we can all continue sharing information openly, in a way that benefits publishers, writers, and readers alike.
- accepted solution
- Allen Tan
- Amazon
- Amazon Kindle
- browser maker
- Chicago
- Computer file formats
- Culture State of the Web Process Business
- Digital rights management
- E-book
- e-books
- e-reader
- e-readers
- e-reading
- Edward Tufte
- Electronic publishing
- EPUB
- FairPlay
- HTML
- HTML
- Internet Explorer
- Kindle
- Layout tools
- Linux based devices
- media distribution
- Mike Monteiro
- Mule Design
- Nick Disabato
- Open formats
- Open standard
- page layout software
- Publishing
- Technology
- upfront printing costs
- Web design
- web designers
- web designs
- web developers
- Web development
- Web Standards
- Web Standards Project
- web workers
- XML
ebooks are a new frontier, but they look a lot like the old web frontier, with HTML, CSS, and XML underpinning the main ebook standard, ePub. Yet there are key distinctions between ebook publishing’s current problems and what the web standards movement faced. The web was founded without an intent to disrupt any particular industry; it had no precedent, no analogy. E-reading antagonizes a large, powerful industry that’s scared of what this new way of reading brings—and they’re either actively fighting open standards or simply ignoring them. In part one of a two-part series in this issue, Nick Disabato examines the explosion in reading, explores how content is freeing itself from context, and mines the broken ebook landscape in search of business logic and a way out of the present mess.
- Adobe
- advertising-filled webpages
- Amazon
- Amazon Kindle
- Amazon.com
- Apple
- Barnes & Noble
- Cameron Koczon
- Chicago
- Computer file formats
- Culture State of the Web Process Business
- cumbersome systems
- Declaration of Independence
- Digital rights management
- E-book
- e-reader
- e-readers
- e-reading
- ebook distributor
- Educational Development Corporation
- Electronic publishing
- EPUB
- final retail price
- Frank Chimero
- Hachette
- HarperCollins
- HTML
- HTML
- Illinois
- International Digital Publishing Forum
- Internet Archive
- Kindle
- Linux based devices
- low retail prices
- Macmillan
- manufacturing
- Michael Hart
- Mike Monteiro
- Mobipocket
- Mule Design
- Newspaper Club
- Nick Disabato
- online documentation
- Open eBook
- Open formats
- page layout software
- Penguin Group
- Print-on-demand services
- Project Gutenberg
- Publishing
- Random House
- retail price
- same technologies
- Simon & Schuster
- smartphone
- suggested retail price
- Technology
- U.S. Department of Justice
- United States
- University of Illinois
- web developers
- Web development
- web frontier
- web standards movement
- XML
- XML
angry tapir writes "While Android is open source, it won't work on a phone without software that generally isn't open source. The Replicant project is an attempt to build a version of Android that doesn't rely on binary blobs for which the source code isn't available to end users, and the software currently works on a handful of handsets. I caught up with the project's lead developer to talk about their efforts to make a completely open source version of Android."
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